Marketing Plan
Marketing is one of the most important activities you engage in; it brings in the leads you turn into sales. Yet most businesses, especially small businesses fail to plan their marketing activities.
What is a Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan is your way of clearly assessing the target customers you will aim your marketing at and what marketing will work best for that audience. If you have been in business for a while you have the advantage of an existing customer base to analyse. You will also have some idea of what positioning works for you.
Your existing customers can provide a bounty of useful information that the startup company can only dream of. Look at the demographics of your customer base, check for groupings, especially among your ‘better’ customers as they are the ones you want more of. If you run a shop you will probably already know the type of customer who brings in most of the cash. Your marketing plan should focus on ways of reaching out to more of the same.
Most of this sounds obvious but so many companies make basic mistakes with their marketing and end up wasting most of their budget.
You wouldn’t (probably)
- Advertise horse feed in a car magazine
- Advertise knitting patterns in a PC games magazine.
BUT; if you are a local shop and the majority of your customers come from your village you might put an advert on the local radio station where 99.9% of the listeners are never going to visit your shop, that is probably worse odds than of some of those car magazine readers owning a horse. Learning who your customers are gives you the ability to then choose the right advertising media to reach them with as much precision as possible.
Writing a marketing plan
If marketing isn’t at the top of your skills list then you need to get some help. A marketing plan layout or template can get you started with the headings filled in but unless you have a good idea of what to put under each heading you may need more help.
There is a premium template at the bottom of this page that includes detailed notes on what goes in each section and how to get that information.
Your marketing plan will move on from identifying target customers and where they can be reached, through discovering their needs and how your product can satisfy them. Then you will work out what your message has to be to appeal to those target customers and how you are going to get it to them.
You will plan the direct marketing you will use and the budget you have to spend, this will vary greatly from start-up to small business and larger organization but there are many marketing options regardless of available budget.
Once your marketing plan has got as far as being ready to roll you still need to make sure you know how you will recognize success. If your plan includes a number of different direct marketing tactics then you need to know which work and which don’t. This lets you stop the failing ones and do more of the ones bringing in results.
Your marketing plan will include:
- Market Analysis
- Customer profile, needs, trends, situation
- Product / Service
- SWOT Analysis, product positioning
- Competitive Analysis
- Direct competition, indirect competitors
- Messaging
- Aimed at target markets, positioning against competitors, value proposition
- Strategy
- Critical success factors, objectives, marketing mix
- Milestones and measures
Here is an outline marketing plan template, you will need Adobe Acrobat reader to view this file.